Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The latest video by Jason Spangler of Scouting Hot Finds highlights how to use Patchvalues.com and the clear advantage it has over quickly out dated printed guides buy valuing. If you like what you see, JOIN TODAY!

First, Patchtrends.com is NOT affiliated in any way with Patchvalues.com.

I have decided that for the time being, I am going to allow anyone who is both a member of Patchtrends.com *and* Patchvalues.com may contribute Patchtrends.com sales data to Patchvalues.com.

In other words, one may use Patchtrends.com as a research tool for contributing price points to the Patchvalues.com database.

I am doing this for the good of the hobby and the fact that I believe with enough momentum, Patchvalues.com can really take off as a useful service. I want Patchtrends.com to help here.

Patchtrends.com at the present has over 1 MILLION auctions saved, and I don't want to be selfish with this data.

If you are the owner or wish to create a focused price guide website for a particular area of the hobby, please contact me. I may be willing to offer the same to your users. I don't want to overlap collection areas (e.g., Patchvalues.com focuses on OA issues). However, I would like to do the same for camp patches, csps, merit badges, etc. As long as it's a targeted type of item.

Refer a Friend Program

I an effort to reach more potential users, I am offering to existing members of Patchtrends.com with a Yearly membership the opportunity to have a FREE annual membership ($15 value).

For up to 3 referrals signing up for a Yearly account, I will reimburse the referrer $5 of the original cost of membership. Getting 3 referrals to sign up will get you the full $15 back.

Rules:

* referrer must be a Yearly members

* referred new member must sign up for a yearly subscription

* this $5 reward is one time only, members must get 3 new sign ups per year (no carry over)

I have a brief video on how to use the "Refer a Friend" tool that members will see once they've logged in.

All monthly accounts will be allowed to remain active, but from now on I am only accepting annual subscriptions.

TOR Organizers, FREE demo account for your events

If you are a TOR organizer, please contact me. I'd like to provide a FREE demo account for use by your TOR's participants for the duration of the event. The idea is to give you something to promote it as a benefit of coming - particularly for potential buyers to increase their awareness about the current value or demand of a particular item.

Finally,

Please feel free to email me directly with questions or call me at any time. I am particularly interested in continuously improving the site from the member side and offering new features. Please let me know what you'd like to see!

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Patchbazaar.com is creating a Boy Scout Patch Super Store. What this means is that we are providing a simple way to search many trusted eBay stores for Boy Scout items, at once. Don't forget, you can create RSS feeds using the "Subscribe to search" feature of the site.

Here is the current list, though note that Patchbazaar.com is not affiliated with any of them:

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Patchbazaar.com is a Boy Scout Patch Super Store, and is made up of items from a growing list of trusted sellers who have eBay stores. Our goal is to be the go-to place for finding the items that your heart is desiring. It is a sister site of Patchtrends.com and Patchlodge.com.

The URL in the address par is also book-markable (that is, you can copy and paste it and share it with others). In the near future, I'll be implementing RSS feeds, book mark generation, and more advanced search and filtering.

If you are an eBay store and wish to submit your store for consideration, please email patchtrends@gmail.com and let us know. At this point there are no firm criteria other than your reputation and references check out.

For right now, it's listing items from just a few reputable sellers. I plan on expanding the selections with your help - so please suggest some other sellers to follow. I will check them out and add them to the site if they are deemed to be highly trusted and have a nice selection of items.

Furthermore, this site will be open for all. I don't plan on member access at this time, but I may expand it to offer special active-auction services for members of Patchtrends.com.

All search options will be available for free, but member access would be required for things like alerts and saved searches. I'd also like to integrate it with the sales data available at Patchtrends. I would also like to integrate a lot of nice features for free, as well.

In the meantime, enjoy Patchtrend and Patchlodge's new sister site - Patchbazaar.com!

Monday, August 26, 2013

This means one may now save as a "live bookmark" the latest results of a specific free search. Steps for creating one of these links:

visit http://www.patchtrends.com/cgi-bin/index

enter search terms for the new feed

click the "Subscribe to search" link, this will generate the RSS feed URL

The next step depends on what browser one uses. If FireFox, it'll offer to save the link as a "live bookmark". Chrome displays the raw content. Either way, one can use any number of RSS Readers out there.

The reader will now update the items in the list as Patchtrends.com adds new items. There is no limit to the number of customized search feeds one may create, so go for it!

Thursday, August 22, 2013

With all of the data that Patchtrends.com is collecting daily, it is interesting to see what kind of facts one can derive.

For example, at last count since the beginning of the year less than 20% of the auction listings for Boy Scout Memorabilia have actually sold!

This means several things are happing:

starting prices are too high

only 20% of the items are actually of interest to buyers

items of interest are priced too high

Only the member search of Patchtrends.com will show the unsold items, which is information that is arguably as important as knowing what an item sold for. The free search is useful, but not for deeply analyzing these trends.

Many auctions that we track are also the same item relisted over and over again for the same price. Seems like Einstein's definition of insanity certainly applies here.

This, however, presents a huge opportunity for buyers who are interested in less popular items. There are tremendous steals out there for older and rarer items. But because people don't know about them or collect them, they sit unsold. Find those hidden treasures!

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

We have been hard at work making the free search something that is useful for those not yet ready to make the jump to full membership, yet enticing enough to make them realize the value of such a yearly membership.

Below is a summary of the recent changes. Following this description is a summary of upcoming enhancements that we hope to implement very soon.

Search Result Thumbnails

When you search in the free search section, one will see tiny thumbnails of the images. While some of the most recent images may not be available immediately, most are. However, the images are not the full size and large images one will see in the membership search. It's useful, but still not what most may want. The full membership search has much larger thumbnails and links to the full size images. The image below illustrates results for a search of Unami flaps.

Permanent Free Search Links

One may now link specific searches in the public search section. For example, the following URL contains the search terms.

Once loaded in the browser, the search is immediately triggered as if the user clicked the "find" button. It's very convenient for linking to searches one may submit frequently.

Permanent Link Generator

Once a set of search terms has been found, one may generate the permanent search link easily by clicking the "save search URL" link. A window will pop up with the encoded URL that may be copy and pasted anywhere. This feature has a lot of room to develop, but the core functionality is there.

Auction Links

Each item that shows in the limited listing has a link that points back to the eBay auction with full information on the item. This convenience was added so that users could find out the details and find an item like it for their own if so desired.

The free search is being improved for casual use, but those interested in more detailed information and a more efficient user interface will definitely want to join Patchtrends.com as a member. More on the benefits of membership may be seen at Patchtrends.com.

Please stay tuned for more posts about using Patchtrends.com and how we're constantly striving to improve this resource for the hobby.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

If you're interested in finding the true value of that Boy Scout patch in your hand or if you want to find out if you're about to over pay for a particular item, follow the instructions for free access to Patchtrends.com Boy Scout memorabilia pricing data in the attached image.

If you'd like to beat the rush and join, visit http://www.patchtrends.com/cgi-bin/index/join. And don't forget about the free gift for all new yearly account sign ups - a $40 value!

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

The top 10 most popular 2013 National Boy Scout Jamboree has been shake up quite a bit this week. The lowest number of bids in the top 10 is 44, the highest 49!The 2013 National Jamboree Northwest Suburban Council/Blues Brothers set, the Great Southwest Council/Yah-Tah-Hey-S lodge 66 OA 2013 National Jamboree, and the 2013 National Scout Jamboree Order of the Arrow Staff Set have proven to be the most popular. You may have ready access to this and many other data by joining Patchtrends.com today!With out further ado:

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

The 2013 National Boy Scout Jamboree items when looked at based on bidding activity paint a much different story than those ranked by amount. One interesting thing you seem to find when looking at the trends related to these patches using Patchtrends.com is that much more often than not, those items with many bids are a) not the same as the highest priced items, and b) often sell for less than the most expensive items.

Given the area's storied past and continued importance to national defense, security, and research I can see why the Great Southwest Council set is such a desired item.

Monday, July 29, 2013

The Top 10 highest selling 2013 Boy Scout National Jamboree #2013jambo items are listed below in order. The most prized item continues to be the commemorative knife sold on 7/19. This list includes sets. The next most highly prized single item is the "2013 Jamboree NESA Staff Neckerchief Rare Prototype", apparently one of a kind.

This list was generated using the member tools at Patchtrends.com. The search link is can be viewed here.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

GLEN, JEAN, W.Va. -- Kyle Corey stood above his display of patches sprawled out on a blanket, eyeing the value of each one."What do you have? Wanna trade?" Corey called out to passersby.He did a once-over of another Scout's handful of patches, examining the stitching and coloring."I don't like the computer-generated ones, really," he said, shuffling it to the back of the pile.

Patchtrends.com has come a very long way, particularly thanks to the help of Jason Spanger (santeeswapper). And as a service it is in a nice place, and my focus with it is promoting it and getting new members to join.

Part of this is called "SEO" or search engine optimization. Basically, I've been working hard to make Patchtrends.com search engine friendly.

As a result, and for other reasons I have made a decision that original Patchlodge.com members will appreciate. I have brought the site back from the grave!

The deciding factor is that Patchlodge.com was well placed in many search engines, and it's just a no brainer to complement it with Patchtrends.com as it grows. I also want to be able to offer additional services other than just price look ups, and the innovative ideas and features offered by Patchlodge are not available anywhere else - and I still want to use them myself!

Access to Patchlodge.com now requires a yearly subscription to Patchtrends.com.

In the coming weeks, I am going to be slowly rolling out this information. I am excited to get current Patchtrends.com members interested in using Patchlodge.com. Coming off of a successful Boy Scout Jamboree, I believe there are a lot of really awesome looking patches that are waiting to be uploaded to Patchlodge.com.

More details will be emerging over the next couple of weeks, but early adopters are welcome. And as a special nod to the wonderful Patchlodge.com members who made the site what it was before I prematurely shut it down, your memberships will be honored without the requirement to join Patchtrends.com; however, the plan is to integrate member-level Patchtrends.com features into Patchlodge. Access to this will require a Patchtrends.com membership to enjoy.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Below is a screenshot of the top 10 highest grossing OA flaps or flap sets of during the2013 Boy Scout Jamboree. That is, the hot items that have been selling during the actual event. Only time will tell what flaps compose the top 10 "of all time".

"Join me for the launch of a new and invaluable resource for the Boy Scout meorabilia collecting community. Brett Estrade and I are formally launching http://www.patchtrends.com in this episode. Roughly a year ago I published an episode of the radio show that finally comes to fruition tonight. In that show on the Prices Realized Guides I longed for an online solution that would make the whole project more robust, searchable, and easily accessed by all collectors in the hobby. When I was approached to partner with Brett Estrade on a new website that would do all that and much much more I jumped at the opportunity. After several months of tweaks and feedback from beta users the site is now live as an online prices realized search tool for the hobby. Catering strictly to the Boy Scout category of eBay this powerful program captures all completed sales listings (including images!) in an off-site database. Subscribers to this new service can then type in any search term and pull up all results that match the query. The database already has results from 500,000 listings and is growing every day. I really feel this site will become as indispensible to collectors as OAimages.com. However, since it is open to every niche in the hobby from OA to camps to Eagle medals anybody can use the service to value and research items. This could be a game-changer! Listen tonight as Brett and I explain how the idea came about, a little bit about the mechanics, and how for only $2/month you can test out the service with a money-back guarantee."

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About Me

I have been collecting patches since I was bitten by the bug at a Conclave in 1991. I am an Eagle Scout, Vigil Honor inductee and former Lodge Chief (#397), and have spent countless nights under the stars.

My passion also extends to computers and programming. As such, I set out in 2013 to create something truly useful.

By utilizing my background in programming and system administration, I created Patchtrends.com with the specific goal of providing the Scout Patch Collecting community the very best, largest price database and research platform possible.

My overall guiding principles can be summed up as:

Obey the Scout Oath and Scout Law

Provide an exception, cutting edge product

Provide exception customer service and focus on customer satisfaction

Promote both patch trading and technology to our Youth

Leave this hobby in a better place than when I found it

I am always looking for new and innovative ways to apply the latest technologies and development in "big data" to the ever growing massive database of Scouting Memorabilia sales data.